Federal soldiers intimidated voters into voting Republican by menacing them at the polls. As Lincoln biographer David Donald has written, "Under the protection of Federal bayonets, New York went Republican by seven thousand votes" in 1864.

The Republican Congress even created three new states -- Kansas, West Virginia, and Nevada -- to help rig the 1864 election in favor of Lincoln, so concerned were they over pervasive antiwar sentiment and massive desertions from the federal army.

It's probable that Lincoln would have won the 1864 election even if he hadn't engaged in such manipulation. But there's no doubt that it helped him in the states with the closest margins of victory.

Why restrict students to government funded university places? Let them pay if they want.

Year 12s have already lodged their university preferences with VTAC. Some may have opted for full-fee courses as a back-up plan if they don’t get into a government supported place.

But these fee-places are criticised by the Australian Labor Party. Indeed, the ALP has promised to abolish fee-places should they be elected to government.

Yet is such an action warranted? And would it improve access to university education?

To find the answer we need to understand how the current system works. The most important feature of the present system is that there are a limited number of government supported places, and universities can only accept the amount of students negotiated with the government. Also, governments—both ALP and Coalition—are unwilling and unable to increase the amount of students that universities can take on board because of financial constraints.

As Andrew Norton, a former advisor to retired federal higher education minister David Kemp, notes:

“You do not need... an ENTER 99, or anything like it, to be able to complete an arts/law degree at Monash University. But you do need an ENTER of 99 to have been ‘clearly in’ for a HECS place in 2005. The reason for this is simple. The number of HECS places in this course, and every other course, is limited. There are various ways we could ration HECS places, but Monash uses what is, in effect, an academic auction in which, instead of bidding with money, you bid with marks. People who did very well in year 12 win in this process.”

Even if governments were to drastically increase expenditure on higher education at the expense of all else, student demand is difficult to predict and having a centralised government doling out money cannot ensure everyone who is competent enough to complete a university course will get past the quota system.

So the high Commonwealth Supported Place entry scores you see are the result of a poorly designed system unable to cope with student demand.

This is where fee-places come in. What fee-places do is alleviate this problem by allowing universities to take in more students who, although intelligent, may have missed out by a few points. If we only had Commonwealth Supported Places to get into university with, there would in all likelihood be far fewer people going to university.

However, having a limited amount of full-fee places is not, in itself, a solution. What if we changed the rules of the game entirely? What if, instead of governments dictating financial arrangements to universities, universities were privatised and allowed to run like businesses—competing for fee-paying students? Experience with competition in other industries suggests fees would lower and quality would improve. With greater university autonomy and a complete removal of ‘red-tape’ in higher education, Australian universities will hone their education product in response to student demand.

We must allow universities to expand supply in response to demand. Students should be able to pay for undertaking a degree -- perhaps through a bank loan -- rather than being dependent on a limited number of government funded places.​Originally published in the 2005 edition of 'The Witherbarian'.

Leithner’s goal is simple: to challenge conventional wisdom in the field of monetary economics. Along the way, he also demolishes a variety of other fallacies surrounding the State and its interventions. Harvard-educated academics – the same people who did not foresee the crisis – have blamed the crisis on capitalism and greed, but Leithner is here to defend the free-market perspective against the Keynesian onslaught.

According to Leithner, government intervention, not market failure, is the underlying cause of recessions and depressions. Government’s interventions are manifested through such measures as fractional reserve banking (FRB), legal tender laws, and central banking. Leithner argues that these forms of meddling in monetary affairs create economic turmoil. Though few people discuss the merits or otherwise of FRB and legal tender laws, central banking is already prominent in mainstream debates.

Central banks are a relatively recent phenomenon. For many years, Australians prospered without a central bank in an environment where private banks issued paper currencies. The pre-1901 era in Australia was a time of free banking, i.e. a situation where government gave no special privileges to banks. ‘Australian banking was relatively free for almost a century from the establishment of the first banks until well into the twentieth,’ explains Kevin Dowd in Laissez Faire Banking, ‘and fully fledged central banking arrived only with the establishment of the Reserve Bank of Australia at the comparatively late date of 1959’.

Nowadays, central bankers are highly praised and government intervention is taken for granted. Leithner questions this naïve faith:

In Australia, economists, investors and journalists babble endlessly about the level at which the Reserve Bank should “set” the “official interest rate”…Alas, almost nobody bothers to ask why it should be set, or whether it actually can be fixed…[F]or reasons rarely discussed and never justified, virtually nobody baulks at the notion that a short-term money market rate of interest must be “set” by a committee of price-fixers and central planners in Martin Place, Sydney.

The media and mainstream academics have done their best to suppress the true causes of the recession. But finally, the truth about the financial crisis is here.

In his latest book, The Evil Princes of Martin Place, investor Chris Leithner puts forward a free-market view of the economic crisis in 2008 as a counter to critics who have blamed capitalism and supported Karl Marx's notion of central banking.

Dr. Leithner's argument is that although the Reserve Bank of Australia masquerades as a "scientific" and independent organization, it is the underlying cause of the financial crisis.

Dr. Leithner is firmly within the Austrian School of Economics, which boasts luminaries such as Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek and respected economist Ludwig von Mises.

Medical doctor Wendell Rosevear, who works on the front-lines of the War on Drugs, explains the hypocrisy of state-sanctioned strip searches:​

When individuals continue to use drugs in prisons, the system feels loss of power and face and with ‘mud on their face’ [and] wants to justify ‘coming down harder’ with strategies such as locking individuals in indefinite solitary confinement after overdoses or drug use and justifying forced internal body cavity searches, strip searches and observed urine tests which make individuals feel degraded and ‘raped’. To deny someone a choice in relation to protecting their body is rape even if you use the power of the state to justify it. The ‘Tough on Drugs’ strategy justifies rape, the very crime our society imprisons individuals for committing. To use the same strategies that cause the problem is to discredit oneself. Strip and Internal Body Cavity searches can happen to ordinary citizens coming through an airport as well as people in prison.

I never thought about invasive searches this way before, but on reflection, it makes a lot of sense. Especially since the courts have always held that rape, in criminal law, does not require penetration of the penis but can also include insertion of any other object into the vagina or anus. In its futile quest to protect people from their own harmful vices, the government is encouraging its agents to do despicable things.

Invasive searches are one way of being raped. Another is to arrest drug users and send them to prison - where prisoners and guards have been known to sexually abuse. Needless to say, this is ineffective in helping addicts. Would we treat alcoholics the same? Would you treat family members the same if they had a drug problem? What a shame that when the government does something, otherwise decent people think it’s acceptable.

Many think that capitalism thrives on conquest, and sincerely believe that capitalism causes wars. This is false.

In purely economic terms, there is no need to go to war for oil (or any other resource).​The reason is simple, and it has to do with the price system. For more, I recommend reading “Do We Need to Go to War for Oil?”, by David Henderson.

In yet another example of the unintended consequences of foreign aid, it was reported that Australia may be paying troops who torture.

According to the Associated Press: "Australia has sent an official to the Indonesian province of Maluku to investigate claims that Indonesia's elite counter-terrorism unit, Detachment 88, which receives millions of dollars from Australia each year, brutalised a group of separatists last month, repeatedly beating them in detention."

Regardless of whether these claims are true, the fact that Australia is sponsoring an organization that actively cracks down on civil liberties is a cause for concern.

Australia's own intelligence agency, ASIO, was the source of controversy a few years ago when it was implicated in the mistreatment of detainee Mamdouh Habib.

We need to stop sending money overseas to organizations that are opposed to the values of ordinary Australians.It's time to end all foreign aid because much of it is misdirected into illegitimate causes, despite the good intentions of those who send taxpayer dollars abroad.

Australian forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001, and entered Iraq in 2003. Although the Rudd Government has withdrawn troops from Iraq, our involvement in Afghanistan is continuing without end. It has become a perpetual war.

Consider this: Australia’s military involvement in World War I lasted four years and World War II was over and done within seven years. The danger posed by terrorism is miniscule compared to the threat from a Hitler or Mussolini, so why has the war in Afghanistan lasted for a longer period of time?

It is time to re-think our involvement.

First of all, the war is very expensive. Taxpayers have been put on the hook for billions of dollars. Imagine if that money had instead been spent at home. If the money must be spent, I’d rather it be spent helping re-build Queensland after the recent flood damage than bombing villages in Afghanistan.

Second, whatever the initial rationale for invading, the Afghan war can no longer be justified. Australia followed the US into Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban and hunt down Osama bin Laden, the man we are told is behind the attacks on September 11. But the best intelligence no longer places bin Laden in Afghanistan, and many believe he is harbouring in Pakistan.

Here’s what should happen next time there’s talk of a major war: it should be a legal requirement for the Prime Minister to seek approval from Parliament before -- or very soon after -- deploying troops abroad. There needs to be a formal binding process, with failure to comply declared unlawful by the courts upon review. That’s the only way we’re going to see some semblance of democratic accountability in foreign affairs.

The Greens have introduced proposed legislation aiming to do precisely this. Unfortunately, the major parties have quashed their attempts at reform.

What if we lived in a world where Parliament, and not the government of the day, possessed the power to commit troops overseas? How would things be different?

One difference would be that a secretive group of ministers – the Cabinet – could not decide upon questions shielded from public scrutiny. With Iraq, the Howard Government would have had to justify the case for war to Parliament’s satisfaction. As it so happens, the Senate voted against going into Iraq. Had the Greens been successful in passing their proposed legislation, Australians would have been spared the terrible costs of that conflict.

Several objections have been raised by opponents of reform.

Some suggest that the Greens’ bill doesn't define terms with sufficient precision. Yet this objection is hardly insurmountable, and can be resolved through consultation with stakeholders. If a compromise is struck between defence chiefs, government departments and other interested parties, then it is possible to devise a workable piece of legislation.

Second, it's said that the bill ignores problems associated with the Executive releasing classified information to Parliament. This is a furphy. Most advocates of reform have never called for the release of classified information. The judgement about whether to wage war against a particular country does not require detailed operational information. It is fundamentally a strategic choice made at a high and abstract level of policy.

In the case of Iraq the Australian Government informed the public that Saddam Hussein was a threat to national security and the public was asked to place trust in intelligence reports they had no way to verify the accuracy of. The Greens are not proposing to do away with such secrecy.

Third, it's argued that war powers reform could hamper the military’s ability to quickly deploy combat personnel. But why is speed considered to be an unambiguously good thing? Parliament’s slow deliberation can be viewed not a liability, but as a strength because it leads to more considered decision-making.

Democracy is far from perfect. Even wars that have been approved by Parliament may end up being unjust. Transferring the power to make war from the Executive to the Parliament would not be a cure-all, but it would at least reduce the ability of a secretive group to thrust Australia into its most vital moment. Parliament should declare war, the Executive should fight and win it, and the nation should then exit the conflict as soon as possible.

A longer version of this article appeared in the Autumn 2011 edition of Policy magazine.

Kim Beazley provides ample evidence why he will probably never become prime minister.

What's "fair" to him are the award rates that effectively price low-skilled migrant workers out of the job market.

The unions love minimum wages because they prevent other workers from taking the jobs of their members. It has nothing to do with helping the poor, because the poor can be helped through welfare payments.

If Labor denies the evidence in favour of higher minimum wages causing increased unemployment, then it needs a crash course in basic economics.

Mr Beazley prides himself on standing up to bullies. Why not stand up to the unions for a change?